News Roundup: How to Have the Most Satisfying Sex (Hint: Don't Do It for Money)

Gawker recently posted on what seems like the biggest waste of tax dollars ever commissioned--apparently some people in Texas (and by “people” we mean University of Texas at Austin) studied “college-aged” men and women to figure out what made for the most satisfying sex.

First of all, let’s talk about how satisfying the sex lives of college students are. This is the period in life when most people lose their virginities, engage in drunken hookups, and spend a lot of time trying to impress their peers and partners with their sexual prowess.

So they’re drunk newbies who don’t want to admit that they don’t know what they’re doing. Couldn’t we, perhaps, survey 30-somethings, who’ve probably figured a few more things out?

We’d argue that very few women have satisfying sex lives at this point in their lives, mostly because they’re still getting over 18 years of upbringing that taught them that female sexuality was icky. They’re too shy to ask for what they want, some don’t’ even know what they want, and a large majority have probably never had an orgasm.

But, OK, here’s the list of dos and don’ts Gawker compiled.

Do:

-have sex for love and commitment. This probably showed up on the list because, as we mentioned before, so many college kids are having one-night stands or hookup buddies with whom it’s hard to achieve the level of trust and comfort required to really figure out the mechanics of sex (penetration aside). It’s probably less that these people are finding sexual satisfaction in love and commitment and more that they’re comfortable having sex with people they love and are committed to. When you have a boyfriend, you can talk about what is and isn’t working for you, and you can create a sexual to-do list. But when you bring a guy home from a bar and you’re convinced that the only way to get him to stick around is to be the best he’s ever had, you’re probably not going to get a lot out of it.

 -have sex to "express something to [your] partner, like gratitude or apology."

Apparently women were more satisfied when they used sex as a way to say “thank you” or “I’m sorry.” We would love someone to explain this study to us in terms of the scientific method, but if we had to guess, we’d say, again, you’re more likely to be thanking or apologizing to someone you know pretty well. So it’s less about getting in fights to have better make-up sex and more about finding a relationship, which usually involves arguments and presents.

Don’t:

-have sex to raise your self-esteem. This is actually probably the only interesting/relevant point this study makes. College women in particular seem to use sex as a method of validation (or, yes, a quick-and-easy self-esteem boost). After all, if someone has sex with you (or even makes out with you), that means you’re doing something right, right?

Actually, no. Men (and women) have sex for a variety of reasons that include things like being horny and taking too many shots of tequila. So if a guy’s having sex with you, it doesn’t even mean that he likes you, but, more importantly, sex is one of the worst forms of validation out there.

If you’re having sex for self-esteem, it’s no wonder you feel unsatisfied, because after you have sex, you’re not magically a more confident, out-going person who loves herself and is totally comfortable in her own skin.

Sex is pretty good at delivering physical pleasure and babies, and that’s it. So if you’re trying to use to for something else, it’s not going to work, and you’re just asking for disappointment.

-have sex "to get goods, favors or other resources." What college kids are having sex for money?? Or a boost on their chem exams? Apparently a lot has changed since we universitied, but we’re not surprised that literally whoring yourself out might not make your toes curl. But when you’re having sex to get something, sexual satisfaction probably isn’t your top priority.

-have sex "to have a new and exciting experience." This one is kind of surprising, and, we’re calling it, kind of bullshit. Neither Gawker nor the original article provide any specifics on this, and our question is, who’s having sex to have a new experience?

If you’re having sex for the sake of having sex, you’re probably losing your virginity, and research that suggests that the first time is rarely the best time isn’t exactly groundbreaking.

Or maybe you’re trying keeping a to-do list. Maybe you’ve always wanted to have sex with a rock star, or a European, or a redhead. Again, it’s not surprising that the pay-off is rarely as good as the build-up.

But what people looking to experiment with role-playing or having sex in an unusual location are also after a new and exciting experience, and a lot of them like the thrill that they get from pretending to be someone else or taking sex outside of the bedroom.

So if any of this research is “news” to you, maybe you need to go back and read our archives. 

News Roundup: Katherine Chloe Cahoon

 There’s a new hack-who’s-so-bad-it’s-good in town, and she’s here to save American women from the horrors of dating men with a blue passport.

Vanderbilt graduate Katherine Chloe Cahoon has discovered the secret to a great love life, and it’s as easy as hopping the pond.

According to Cahoon (who, by the way, cannot interview a single “subject” without uncontrollably giggling), European men are more romantic. (That’s what we assume she wants us to conclude, anyway—her video is just a collection of “interviews” that look more like super-awkward first dates with no conclusion/message.)

We have a feeling Cahoon made this video for the sole purpose of talking to the men in the video, and the results are hilarious. Highlights include her secret to meeting European men (the nonlocational “sports”), and you have to watch just to hear the answer to the hard-hitting “What do men from the Balkan peninsula love most?”

 (And the Frenchman she picked, who’s about as sexy as the Parisian Metro at rush hour.) 

OK, in all serious, we touched on this a bit before in our post on dating men with accents, but setting out to date a man who can get you into the EU is like picking a college based on the sweatshirts.

If you fall in love with a Frenchman, great. But if you limit your search to guys who call it the “American War of Independence,” you’re really shrinking your pool of eligible bachelors. It’s hard enough to find someone you click with in your zip code—why make it worse?

There’s also the cultural barrier. If the ultimate goal in a relationship is understanding, you have to do a lot more work to get there when the guy you’re dating has never heard of Sesame Street.

That’s not to say that two people from different countries can’t have wonderful, meaningful relationships—if they couldn’t, we wouldn’t be around to write this blog today.

But going out and looking for a relationship that, by definition, presents more challenges than most is a different story.

Don’t turn down a date just because he’s British. But don’t turn down an American just because he isn’t.

Lessons from Karen F. Owen

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Scoring Sunday's Nuptials: DC Edition

If you’re a girl and you’re bored at work on Mondays, chances are, you scan the NYTime’s Wedding Section and make fun of the profiled blushing brides.

And if you identify with all of the above and also hold a liberal arts degree (e.g., pottery making, beading, English), you’re probably already very familiar with Gawker’s Nuptial Roundup. But for the rest of us, Gawker writers/editors basically do the same Monday morning wedding planning that you do, only better (but if you were getting paid to do it, you’d probably be just as snarky).

This week, Gawker pitted couples against couples in an NCAA-style bracket, jealousy(but actually probably closer to self-loathing)-induced hilarity ensued.

We thought: if they can do it in New York, we can do it in DC. But turns out we were wrong. Very wrong.

To start, the Post only publishes three weddings a week, so we had to include the past two weeks to come up with an interesting bracket. Then we followed Gawker’s lead and ranked them by column length.

Quarterfinals: How They Met
Semifinals: The Proposal
Finals: The Wedding

Quarterfinals: How They Met

Richard Imirowicz and Terrance Heath (1) vs. Carry Galnar and Gustav “Gus” Evler (6)

Imirowicz and Heath are a gay, biracial couple with two kids and a two-page online spread on their recent DC marriage. Does it even matter how they met? Unfortunately, it does, and the fact that they met on an “AOL dating site” doesn’t bode well for them. Galnar and Evler met in Princeton, NJ—but wait: while the bridegroom was supping in dinner clubs and waxing poetic in ivy-lined halls, the bridegroom was attending Westminster Choir College. Heard of it? Neither have we.

Winner: Richard Imirowicz and Terrance Heath (1)

Jennifer Heyman and Jared Okan (2) vs. Jim Beller and Chris Wolf (5)

The Heyman-Okan team met in Hebrew school, and Wolf caught Beller’s eye at a dinner party. Wow. Can you get any more normal? This round’s headed into overtime, and the tie-breaker? Pick-up line. Beller offered Wolf unnecessarily cutlery, while Okan said, “We should date” (and then the script said to which Heyman replied, “Let’s give it a shot").
Winner: Jim Beller and Chris Wolf (5)

Adrienne Skipoora and Alex Skuttlerman (3) vs. Jessika Twodder and Phillip Sedoze (4)

Skipoora and Skuttlerman met on Jdate and had their first date on Christmas day. Twodder and Sedoze met at a glorified frat party.
Winner: Adrienne Skipoora and Alex Skuttlerman (3)





Semifinals: The Proposal

Richard Imirowicz and Terrance Heath (1) vs. BYE

According to the article, they’d kind of already been married twice when they got gay married in DC (and the second time was on a “Rosie O'Donnell cruise for gay families”), so Imirowicz and Heath squeak by on a lucky bye.
Winner: Richard Imirowicz and Terrance Heath (1)

Adrienne Skipoora and Alex Skuttlerman (3) vs. Jim Beller and Chris Wolf (5)

Skuttlerman proposed to Skipoora on an early-morning beach stroll in Costa Rica. He gets negative points for creativity, but luckily, his opponents also seem to have skipped the proposal (though the article tries to gloss over this by throwing random boring facts—like the fact that both are fourth-generations Washingtonians—in the “proposal” section). Which is too bad, because, despite the low seed, the Beller-Wolf team was becoming a crowd favorite.
Winner: Adrienne Skipoora and Alex Skuttlerman (3)

Finals: The Wedding

Richard Imirowicz and Terrance Heath (1) vs. Adrienne Skipoora and Alex Skuttlerman

Skipoora and Skuttlermanbought their chuppah at Home Depot; Imirowicz and Heath, despite loosing points for taking their kids to Clydes post-nuptials, got married on the first day it was legal in DC at what sounds like the most afterlife-obsessed nondenominational church in DC: All Souls Unitarian Church.
Winner: Richard Imirowicz and Terrance Heath (1)

Conclusion: Unlike their New York counterparts, Washingtonians are a lot more like you and me. They come from families that don’t have their own Wikipedia pages, they have actual jobs, and they don’t blow half their trust fund on nuptial floral arrangements. In other words, they’re more boring. It seems like we’ll have to leave the wedding pages to the New Yorkers, but don’t worry! We’ve still got… the White House?

Another Gawker Story... So You Don't Have to Page Through All the Boring Ones Yourself

Picture it ... Valentine's Day 1991. I'm a sophomore in college and have been dating the hot guy who lives across the parking lot in my apartment complex - we'll call him G. We've been making out for a while and casually dating ... and then decide we'll move it into more serious territory, just in time for Valentine's Day.

He wakes up early to put a rose on my car before I have to leave for my first class. Awww. We have a makeout session at his place that afternoon, where we express our feelings and remark how special we are to each other. It's touching. I've only had one boyfriend for Valentine's Day before, and he turned out to be an abusive stalker. This is my first healthy relationship in almost two years, and I'm over the moon. I decide to cook him an awesome spaghetti dinner ... and then we'll finally consummate our relationship.

I decide to make the meatballs from the freezer that my roommate had purchased. I make a fantastic dinner for two, complete with candles and a nice peach sorbet for dessert. We head upstairs to begin our wonderful night together. I'm so nervous, because it's our first time together and I haven't been with anyone new in years.

After making out for a while, he excuses himself to use my bathroom which was attached to the bedroom. He proceeds to have what appears to be EXPLOSIVE diarrhea from what I can hear from my half-naked position on the bed near the bathroom door. There's grunting, swearing, panting, and soon cries to God are pouring out of him as freely as the dinner he's ingested less than an hour before. I'm not sure what to do ... do I call attention to his pain by asking him if he's OK, or just let him wait it out? He's got to be embarrassed, because I'm completely mortified.

After what seems to be an eternity (and was probably about 45 minutes), he emerges from the bathroom completely pale and very sweaty. He's a trouper, though. We proceed to have not-so-energetic sex and he hobbles across the parking lot back to his house. Within twenty minutes, I am the one in the bathroom, cursing my ancestors, the shower curtain, the sorbet, and bargaining quite ineffectively with God.

Two days later, my roommate returns home from her trip and I tell her about my disastrous evening. I tell her I've used her ground chuck to make the meatballs, and she exclaims, "OMG... I bought that when we moved in!"

Which was the previous June.

G and I continued to see each other, for some months afterward, but it didn't work out. I never cooked for him again. Luckily.

My Bloody Valentine

Taken from Gawker's Valentine's Day horror stories, though we kind of doubt the fact-checkers are working round the clock on these ones.

I was 25, recently out of law school and a relationship I was sure would end in marriage, and I was working in a firm that I absolutely despised. I was heartbroken, disenchanted, and, at a fundamental level, bored with life. So I signed up for an online dating service.

After a number of forgettable dates with various mid-level managers, radiologists, IT guys, technical writers, and random other guys lost in the same sort of personal and professional morass of their 20s, seeking some sort of connection, I met a guy who was totally not my type. He’d recently quit his corporate job to start his own business, was about a decade older than me, and couldn’t properly conjugate the verb to take, leading my best friend to call him Captain Tooken.

The Captain and I saw each other irregularly at first. I was still drinking at the time, and in retrospect he was a second or third generation alcoholic, so our dates generally consisted of hanging out, drinking a lot, and not much else. Eventually a pattern emerged- we’d go out, see a movie or a show, have dinner, maybe hang out at his place, and at the end of the night he’d put me in my car and say goodnight, without even a kiss. (Drinking and driving is bad, children). After the fourth or fifth time this happened, it started to intrigue me that the Captain hadn’t made any sort of physical move, and this intrigue kept me in the quasi-relationship. As I mentioned above, I was feeling pretty jaded and numb, so anything out of the ordinary was enough to catch my attention. I had a blog at the time and would detail these dates, and had a crowd of internet strangers weighing in on why the Captain hadn’t tried anything physical yet. Some thought gay, others thought he was recovering from a bad relationship, I didn’t really care because suddenly I had something vaguely novel going on in my life.

Fast forward six months (yes, really). Captain Tooken still has not so much as kissed me, and is still walking me to my car after every date- now once a week or more- and hugging me goodnight. Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, and I wonder if this is going to change anything in our chaste goodnight dance. The blogosphere is getting restless, and encouraging me to take him down in the street like a wildebeest, all tongue and sexual frustration, the next time he walks me to my car.

The Captain tells me a few days before the big day that he will be away with his dad, so can’t do anything, but would like to make it up to me by taking me out a few nights before. We go to a notorious dive bar in our city for blues and PBR tall boys. It was an inauspicious time of the month for me, but I didn’t think anything of it given the nature of our relationship. His brother, sister-in-law, and mother all come to the bar that night, and pretty soon I am absolutely wasted (as is the rest of the family) and basking in the drunken warm feeling of being introduced to his family and everyone liking me, and all of us ordering next round after next round.

I wake up in the cold light of earliest morning in a room I don’t recognize, no clothes, my head banging with pain, with that absolutely certain feeling that I have done something I will regret. I turn my head an inch, despite the screaming hangover, and there is the Captain in bed next to me. The situation hits me in a rush. I lift up the sheets and see blood, everywhere. It looks like someone has slaughtered a pig on the bed. I slip out of the sheets and sneak off to bathroom to clean myself up, passing our clothes in the hallway, on the stairs. I realize I can’t even sneak out to my car and drive home because we’ve left my car at the bar on the other side of town. I do my best in the half bath and then slip back into the bed, careful not to wake up the Captain.

I feign sleep until he wakes up, looks around, gasps, and heads for the shower. I commence to stripping the bed (the mattress is in the condition you would expect), stuffing the sheets in the washer, finding his linen closet for fresh sheets, realizing the only other set of sheets he owns are twin size and won’t fit the bed, and eventually just throw the comforter over the worst of the scene and get dressed. It doesn’t dawn on me to flip the mattress until he has already turned off the shower and I don’t have enough time. By the time he comes out of the bathroom I’m downstairs on the couch, fully dressed, ready to get the hell out of dodge. We make small talk and he repeatedly asks me if I’d like to take a shower, and eventually we go to breakfast, all because I am trying so hard to not acknowledge the abattoir conditions I woke up to that I can’t manage much else, and at long last I am free and go home and fixate on what the hell.

We end up dating for another year, and neither one of us ever mentions our Valentine’s Day massacre. I never have the nerve to ask if he bought a new mattress or not.

Inadvertently Flirting When You’re Taken

There’s been a lot of blogging about the article Gawker did on flirting while in a relationship and the (way more hilarious) follow up.

Since this article was first posted, the morality of flirting-while-taken has been blogged to death, but one of our readers sent in a different take on this situation.

Recently, while visiting my girlfriend, I was in an awkward situation that I was reminded of while reading these articles. We were hanging out with my girlfriend's group of friends, most of whom I hadn't met yet. One of the guys was gay, but I figured that he knew I was straight since I was visiting this girl, so I didn't even consider the possibility of accidentally flirting with him. However, later in the night, once we had left the place where we were hanging out, my girlfriend got texts from this guy saying "hey is your friend gay?" and "is your friend coming back to hang out with us?" Then, the next day, once I had left, the guy told her that I was "raping him with [my] eyes" and flirting with him the whole time. Now, I did talk to him a little bit, and maybe he took my eye contact for something much more than it was, but I certainly didn't even think of the possibility that I was flirting with him. This particular situation is complicated due to the differing sexual preferences of the parties involved, but it still made me wonder about an age old question: what exactly is flirting and how do you know when you're doing it?

I'd really like to hear your two cents on innocently flirting, or even innocently talking to, someone who might be interested in you, even though you are off-limits due to a monogamous relationship. Obviously every situation is different, but are there certain things that one can do to avoid leading on someone you're just trying to have a simple conversation with?

We think this sums up the other side of the problem. Yes, there are guys who feel the need to mention the fact that they have a girlfriend even if you’re only interacting with them because they rear-ended you at a stoplight (“Sorry I hit you, bythewayIhaveagirlfriend.”)

But what about when you smile at someone for two seconds and he follows you around the bar for the rest of the night?

We see this more of a question of etiquette than anything else. Yes, it sucks to feel like you accidentally led someone on (or, even worse, to feel like you were the one led on), but, at the end of the day, it’s not really that big of a deal.

If someone’s coming on too strong, drop the g-bomb (or b-bomb, depending on your gender/sexual preference). If the person still doesn’t get the hint, walk away.

But if he’s not letting on that he thinks you’re flirting and only texts someone afterwards (like in the situation above), is it really an issue? You’ll probably never see the guy again, and, even if you did, he doesn’t need to know that you saw those messages.

There’s no need to make him feel bad by rubbing your relationship in his face—especially if he isn’t coming on to you at all. Some people are just going to see things that they want to believe are true, and even if you invited them to your heterosexual wedding, they’d still tell their friends that you were making eyes at them during the first dance.

We’re taking off early for the weekend and heading to LA. See you Tuesday (no pun intended).